Author
William Cowper is documented in Fuller’s books, published essays, and journals (1836–1847). 3 distinct works are named, most often in Journal December 1836, and the most intensive engagement recorded is “analyzed”.
Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this author is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →
“Southey's life of Cowper - Dr. C. had been reading it - spoke of it as being merely a judicious compilation. Expressed great admiration for Cowper's letters; thought they could only be enjoyed by the English mind: Knew of no other English letters which were distinguished by such naiveté and delicacy; knew of many much richer in point of thought.”
This page brings together documented engagements currently identified within the Fuller Reading Worlds catalog.
Selected passages from Fuller’s own writings, in chronological order.
“Southey's life of Cowper - Dr. C. had been reading it - spoke of it as being merely a judicious compilation.”
Fuller, Margaret. "Journal December 1836." Houghton Library, Harvard University; MS Am 1086; Box 3.
Inferred Fuller names Cowper and discusses his letters specifically; title inferred as Letters (the collected correspondence) based on Channing's praise of their naiveté and delicacy.
“O that those lips had language. Life has passed / With me but roughly since I heard thee last.*”
Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1845.
Inferred Quoted phrase 'O that those lips had language / Life has passed / With me but roughly since I heard thee last' matches opening lines of Cowper's elegy on his mother's portrait. Opening couplet of Cowper's '“On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture out of Norfolk”' (1798). Fuller quotes it as a boy reciting at a school exhibition.
“Cowper saw the follies and vices of mankind as clearly, but his Christian love is an ever softly-murmuring under-current, which relieves the rude sounds of the upper world.”
Fuller, Margaret. Papers on Literature and Art. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846. · p78
Also printed in Art, Literature, and the Drama (1869), p78; page given is to the 1869 reprint.
“They who had often enjoyed reading the account of John Gilpin’s in America thought that now they were in England”
Fuller, Margaret. "Things and Thoughts in Europe . . . IX." New-York Daily Tribune, 19 February 1847. · 19 February 1847